It's late in the new gTLD day and the program looks to be inching ever closer to the finish line. Yet last minute hiccups seem to be a recurring theme for this ambitious project to expand the Internet namespace far beyond the 300 odd active TLDs in existence today (counting generics and country codes). A drive for growth which is already underway, with 63 gTLD contracts now signed as of mid September... But will those users find themselves at greater risk because of this namespace expansion? That's what several parties have been asking in recent months. more
On Wednesday September 29th at 1PM there will be a meeting in the Old Executive Building in Washington D.C. with Registries and domain Registrars to discuss illegal Internet sales of prescription drugs. ICANN was originally invited but declined because citing "inappropriateness" . One "U.S." Registrar who definitely will not be in attendance is OnlineNIC more
The Registration Operations Workshop (ROW) was conceived as an informal industry conference that would provide a forum for discussion of the technical aspects of registration operations in the domain name system and IP addressing. The 10th ROW will be held online on Tuesday, June 8th, 2021 at 13h00-17h00 UTC. Click to learn more about the discussion topics and registration details. more
A third lawsuit has been filed late Friday in a federal district court in California against VeriSign, Inc. over its controversial DNS wildcard redirection service known as SiteFinder. It was filed by the longtime Internet litigator Ira Rothken. In addition, while two other lawsuits have been filed by Go Daddy Software, Inc. and Popular Enterprises, LLC. in Arizona and Florida, this is the first lawsuit to seek class-action status. Here is an excerpt from the "Introduction" section of this class-action lawsuit... more
ICANN's latest announcement of preliminary approval for two new top level domains (.mobi and .jobs) and it's recently ended meetings in Cape Town, South Africa, have sparked off renewed discussions for the introduction of new TLDs -- more specifically, the expansion of sponsored and generic top level domains (TLDs). The following is a collection of recent commentaries made by both technical and non-technical members of the community with regards to the expansion of the domain name space. To add your comments to this collection, please use the comment entry form at the bottom of the page... more
Is it really 2022? Is it? Although many might view 2021 as another "lost" year due to the pandemic, filled with Zoom™ meetings, virtual conferences, working from home and restricted travel - there were a number of notable domain name stories which deserve to be highlighted. So, without further ado, here are the top 10 biggest domain name stories of 2021 - let's go! more
In June of 2008 KnujOn reported that 70 Registrars did not have a business address listed in the InterNIC Registrar Directory. Only after reporting a month later that little had changed did ICANN perform a mass update of the directory. On further inspection we found many of the newly disclosed addresses were phantom locations, false addresses, and PO boxes. more
A company called PW Registry Corporation makes the following announcement regarding the .PW ccTLD originally designated for the country of Palau: "The PW Registry Corporation announced today plans for the activation of the PW top- level domain (TLD), the Internet's first and only domain extension devoted to "Communities of Shared Interests". Unlike other domain extensions, such as .com, .biz, and .info, PW is aimed at providing individuals and consumer/affinity organizations a highly-personalized, permanent and portable e-mail address and a managed platform for community and social networking." more
No that's not really happening, Google is not buying VeriSign. But given Google's ravenous appetite for data, it might find VeriSign quite attractive. VeriSign has both root domain name servers and servers for the .com and .net top level domains (TLDs). VeriSign could data mine the queries coming into those servers and produce a very valuable real-time stream of what users on the net are doing... Google just bought Postini -- and one would have to be fairly naive to believe that Google does not intend to dredge through all... more
There has been a lot of back and forth recently in the ICANN world on what constitutes domain abuse; how it should be identified and reported AND how it should be addressed. On one side of the camp, we have people advocating for taking down a domain that has any hint of misbehaviour about it, and on the other side we have those that still feel Registries and Registrars have no responsibility towards a clean domain space. (Although that side of the camp is in steady decline and moving toward the middle ground). more
Yesterday I said that the original motivations for adding new TLDs were to break VeriSign's monopoly on .COM, and to use domain names as directories. Competitive registrars broke the monopoly more effectively than any new domains, and the new domains that tried to be directories have failed. So what could a new TLD do? more
Looking back at 2010, here is the list of top ten most popular news, blogs, and industry news on CircleID in 2010 based on the overall readership of the posts (total views as of Jan 1, 2011). Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership and best wishes to the entire community for 2011. Happy New Year! more
In the coming months, ICANN will ambitiously expand the number of top-level domains (TLDs). ICANN could add ".movie" and ".paris", among others, to the existing ranks of ".com", ".org", ".gov", and ".edu". Here's another they should consider: a new ".pol" TLD that is reserved exclusively for political candidates and entities. A ".pol" TLD is needed to alleviate problems linked to a now-common phenomenon called political cybersquatting... more
For years, corporate domain name administrators have scoffed at every new second-level and third-level country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) liberalization, and rightly so. Until recently, most had continued the practice of registering significant numbers of variations, misspellings and typo-squats. While I have never encouraged the practice of registering every variation in every geography, as this becomes prohibitively expensive over time... With what seems to be the imminent launch of hundreds of new TLDs as a result of ICANN's new initiative, companies appear to be saying enough is enough, and meaning it. more
ICANN's Board voted to accept the latest settlement proposal by a vote of 9 to 5: "Today, ICANN's Board of Directors approved, by a majority vote, a set of agreements settling a long time dispute between ICANN and VeriSign, the registry operator for the .COM registry. These settlement documents include a new registry agreement relating to the operation of the .COM registry..." more